7 Best Things You Can Do for Yourself in Recovery

Embarking on recovery can be alternately exciting and full of promise as well as frightening, confusing, and filled with potential pitfalls. Statistically speaking, early recovery is when most people have problems that may lead to relapse. That is, relapse rates are high in the first 90 days to 6 months. Knowing what to do ahead of time to protect against relapse is important. But strengthening your capabilities and working your recovery plan are every bit as critical. How can you put more mortar into your recovery foundation? Here are seven of the best things you can do for yourself in recovery:

1. No Major Life Changes in the First Year

Recovery experts caution that you shouldn’t make any drastic life changes during the first year of your recovery. This includes all the same kind of elements that are major stressors to anyone – but especially those in early recovery. Don’t enter into a new romantic relationship, get married, or file for divorce during this time. Stick it out in your old job, if you still have one. Hold on to your home or stay in the same residence. What’s the reason for this? Maybe you feel you’re strong enough to weather the tension and stress such major life moves entail, but you’re really not. Any little thing can send you over the edge – and back into using. Stability is one of the most important things for your early recovery. You need time to become practiced in employing your coping mechanisms, to get familiar with a healthier routine, to develop new and sober relationships, and to begin to map out the kind of future that fits with the vision you want for your new life in sobriety.

There will be plenty of time – the rest of your life, in fact – to make big changes. If you get pressure from others to move faster during the first year, tell them gently but emphatically that you need to work your recovery now. If they care about you and your recovery, they will understand. If they still pressure you, they’re either uncaring or uninformed about how critically important the first year is to those in recovery.

2. Get Into 12-Step Rooms

You’ve heard it already, but it bears repeating again and again: Get into the 12-step rooms and work the steps for your recovery. There’s no better support group that you can find – anywhere. The 12-step groups are fellowships of men and women who share a common desire – a commitment to maintaining sobriety and a willingness to help others do the same.

The fact of the matter is that you will desperately need people who can relate to you during the early part of your recovery. There will be times when the floor seems to fall out from under you and you panic that you won’t be able to resist the temptation to fall back on your using behavior. When problems and stresses mount up, relationships fall apart, money troubles multiply, or you’re dealing with legal or medical issues, it’s too easy to want to escape it all by numbing out with drugs, alcohol, or your former addictive behavior of choice.

Everyone in the 12-step rooms has been there before. They know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night in a panic, or go through the days filled with anxiety or depression. Countering the feeling of hopelessness and helplessness is something you have to do, but you can’t do it alone. Call on your 12-step sponsor – and getting a sponsor should be one of the first things you do when you start going to your regular 12-step meetings – to help you through the rough times. And, don’t kid yourself. There will be some very tough days ahead. Remember that your sponsor pledges to always be there for you. That means you can call on him or her whenever you feel you need help. It isn’t an imposition, and you’re not asking for anything other than what the sponsor has promised to do. After all, there may come a time when you will be in a position to be able to help someone else in early recovery – after you’ve been sober for at least one year and feel comfortable in your sobriety.

3. Build Structure into Your Life

Now that you’re no longer in active treatment, you may feel exhilarated about all the free and unstructured time on your hands. Don’t fall into this trap. It’s a sure-fire way to backslide into relapse. You actually need structure at this time, especially the first 90 days to 6 months. Why is structure so important? For one thing, you need to become fully practiced in using your newly-learned coping skills. For another, you need time to develop your support network. You also need the discipline of adhering to a regular schedule of 12-step meeting attendance, seeing your counselor or therapist, and working your steps to recovery.
Building structure into your life isn’t difficult. Start by making a daily and weekly schedule. At first, account for every hour of the day. That’s right, every hour. Keep a daily planner so that you can add or subtract or switch out components as necessary. Make sure to factor in leisure time as well as time for intellectual and spiritual development and time for taking care of your own physical well-being.

The beauty of having a structure for your daily life is that you always know what comes next. Having a plan means less anxiety over what you should be doing. There’s less downtime or idle moments when cravings can creep in and take over your thoughts. Not that such cravings won’t surface. They definitely will. But getting involved in the next thing on your to-do list will help you overcome those cravings, which will subside after a short time as you concentrate on other things.

Speaking of structure, factor in the 90-in-90 rule. Attend 90 12-step meetings in 90 days. This is an excellent and built-in structural aid that will reap countless benefits as you strengthen your confidence in your recovery.

4. Find Some New Friends

Your circle of friends that are appropriate for your new sober lifestyle may have diminished in size. That’s generally what happens as you know you can’t be around the people, places, and things that precipitate using. The best antidote to the loneliness of early recovery is to make new friends.

Before you object that this is easier said than done, give it a try. You are already going to 12-step meetings. While it certainly isn’t mandatory that you become friends with fellow 12-steppers, it is bound to happen more often than not. So your 12-step meetings are one place where you can meet new people who may become your friends over time.

Another good way to find some new friends is to get involved in a recreational or leisure pursuit. Take up cross-country or downhill skiing or join a fly-fishing club. If you love books, join a book reading club. If you’re a writer, track down a writers’ club in your area and start attending meetings. If you have a desire to go back to school to finish or start a degree or learn a new skill, you’ll find ample opportunities for new acquaintances among your new classmates.

Making friends is also a good way to broaden your horizons. While you were immersed in your addiction, you probably limited your daily activities. Most likely, all you thought about was the next time you’d be able to use or searching out your drug of choice. Walking around in a drug-induced fog, or consumed by your addiction, you weren’t in a position to form positive and healthy relationships. Those friendships you did have, if they didn’t involve using, were probably few and far between. More than likely, they faded away as your behavior became more bizarre and drug-related.

Now is the time to change all that. Once you start getting out there and participating in healthy activities, you’ll find that people are both interesting and interested in you. Just take it slow and let friendships form naturally. Be open and positive, but don’t feel you need to unburden your entire life story to everyone you meet. We’re talking about friendships here, not psychotherapy.

5. Focus on Your Needs

It sounds a little selfish, doesn’t it? But it really isn’t. Now is when you need to focus on your own needs, as opposed to the needs of others. Your entire focus needs to be on your recovery. Finding out what you really want in your new life will take some careful self-analysis. During your addiction, you may not have thought much about what the future would be like. You may have been in such a downward spiral that you contemplated committing suicide to end your pain. Now that you’re in recovery, the future may seem like a scary place. You may need to discover or re-discover what’s really important to you in order to shape the direction your life in sobriety will take.

Going through your introspection means that you should cut yourself some slack. Avoid being self-critical or thinking that you should be farther along in your recovery than you are at this moment. Everyone’s path is different. There will be up days and down days, and times when you feel uncertain whether your decisions are motivated by the right intentions.

Let’s take a few examples of where your focus on needs may come into play. If you have lingering medical conditions caused or
exacerbated by your addiction, you need to focus on regaining your physical health. This entails taking any prescribed medications, eating well-balanced and regular meals, getting adequate sleep, and keeping your appointments with your doctors.
You may want to overlook your physical needs in your desire to move forward with your recovery, but the fact is that your body must be in good shape in order for you to maximize your recovery efforts. When you’re tired or stressed or physically ill, your resolve to maintain sobriety is jeopardized.

Another example of paying attention to your own needs involves setting aside the time required for your meeting attendance. Family members and friends, well-meaning though they may be, may want to capture your time for various activities. You need to inform them that you will be attending 12-step meetings (along with meetings with your counselor or therapist, doctors and other appointments) as a necessary and ongoing part of your recovery. This isn’t selfish. It’s critical to your successful recovery.
Criticism of you being self-absorbed should also be deflected. While you take your self-inventory of needs and work your steps in the program, you will be somewhat detached. You need to be. It’s hard work coming to grips with all these things. Many of the feelings and thoughts you will encounter will be disturbing and painful. You will need time to sort them out, and that means you need to focus on those needs first and foremost.

Of course, focusing on your needs doesn’t mean that you turn a blind eye to your loved ones and friends. Be with them and a part of activities as much as you can – as long as it doesn’t interfere with your recovery efforts. When you are with them, really be with them. Strive to put your full attention on family communication and interaction so that every moment you are with them counts. By being in the moment with your loved ones, they will be better able to accept the time when you are tending to your recovery needs.

6. Learn to Shrug Off Disappointments

One of the biggest lessons you need to learn is that everything is not a big deal. This sounds a little simplistic, but it’s really only a way to boil a concept down to easy-to-understand terms. One way to approach this is to take the long view. What will the importance be of whatever it is you’re worrying about now in 10 years? Will the fact that you didn’t get the house completely repainted in your designated timeframe matter then? Give yourself some leeway on projects and don’t get bogged down in minor disappointments.

Okay, sure you’ll feel deflated if you don’t get the promotion you feel you deserve. That’s more than a minor disappointment, but the same principle holds true for major ones. Take the long view. Maybe there’s a reason why it fell through. Try to identify the cause and work on the solution.

7. Build Resiliency

One of the best things you can do for yourself in recovery is to build your resilience. Resiliency is your ability to bounce back after setbacks, to shrug off disappointments, to take an alternate approach if needed, and to understand that recovery isn’t a straight-line process. Think about trees as an example of resiliency. Trees are able to bend during strong winds and return to upright position after the force passes. Without such a capability, they’d break apart or uproot. It’s the same with personal resiliency in recovery. Weathering the storm of major and minor challenges, self-rediscovery, and charting new goals requires a lot of resilience.

Your 12-step sponsor and other group members can be good resources for helping develop your resiliency. Listening to others talk about how they got through various struggles and challenges will not only motivate you but give you potential strategies to use in your own situation. Take whatever works and adapt it to your circumstance. If it doesn’t work as well as you’d like, modify it or discard it and try something new. This is resilience in action in recovery.

Remember that there is no end in the word recovery. You will be in recovery for the rest of your life. Recovery is a vital process, as important to your living as breathing. As you gain more time in recovery, however, you will become so practiced in your healthy and sober lifestyle that you will no longer worry about the recovery process. You won’t obsess over how long it takes or whether you’ll ever be done, as is common for newcomers. Instead, you will live every day in recovery. That’s a huge difference.

Bottom line: Living in recovery is the best outcome of all. It’s a celebration of life – your life – and a testament to your commitment.

Written by Guest Writer Suzanne K